PC Pro just published a story about how ISP’s are wildly exaggerating the cost of rising data.  As someone involved in computers and networking for the last 15 years, I’ve always known this was bullshit.  We spent the last decade piling up capacity with dark fiber.  The Cisco core routers that power the internet can handle a tremendous beating.  We are not anywhere close to saturating the capacity we got.  We could put a gigabit connection to every home in the states, running at full capacity every second of every day and not saturate it.  They already do that in South Korea.  Yet, more and more ISPs are crying poverty and implementing insidious bandwidth caps on their users.

I need Verizon MiFi for business travel, but it burns me up that I pay $50 a month, plus government surcharges, for a mere 5 GB a month.  If my company didn’t pay for it, I’d never have it.  What a joke.  Let’s turn on faster bandwidth and then limit it.  Awesome.  So now I can burn through my data cap much faster!  Thanks Verizon.

The whole “cloud revolution” will never happen if we have to keep watching our bandwidth so we don’t get a God damn $1000 bill at the end of the month.  Forget offsite backups, forget apps in the cloud, forget streaming music and video.  The PC Pro article points to a study commissioned by the BBC and Skype that proves that the bandwidth surge is a myth.  It’s just another power grab by the megacorps that control the internet and our wallets.  And some people are actually angry about Net Neutrality laws?  They don’t understand what the laws are about in the least.  Oh that’s right, they think the internet is “a series of tubes,” not a dump truck you can just put stuff on.    From the article:

The report claims the cost of delivering additional gigabytes of data are mere pennies. “Studies in Canada and in the UK… put the incremental cost of fixed network traffic at around €0.01-0.03 per GB.”


When the laws get destroyed in the wake of “fair competition” or whatever nonsense argument people are coming up with, then they will understand what the geeks were bitching about.  The first time their internet starts acting like a TV, and they can’t get to certain web sites, like they can’t get certain channels without paying, then they will understand.  In the background, You Tube or Netflicks won’t have reached at deal with [INSERT ISP] for whatever fake, strong arm fees they came up with to offset “rising bandwidth costs” and people won’t be able to get to those sites.  In fact, ISPs have routinely bullshitted us about streaming services like Netflix.    The fact is that all of the ISPs that have choosen to rate limit people have one thing in common: their own streaming video service.  That’s Verizon, Comcast and AT&T.  AT&T may be the only exception here, because their network is just garbage and impossible to run because of the intense amount of regulation they face.  IT workers at that company couldn’t get something done if they tried.

Here’s how you know their data problems are nonsense.  None of them rate limit their own streaming services.  Big surprise.  I honestly wish there was something we could do about this.  Letter writing?  A massive protest?  These seem like the tools of the past.  We need new ways to vent our rage to the bastards that are stealing from us every day.